An unconventional convention?

The Organising Bureau of School Student Unions (OBESSU) is an umbrella organisation for all school student unions in Europe and many were represented at its first ever School Students’ Convention, which was jointly organised with Unione Degli Studenti (UDS), the Italian umbrella students’ union. Countries as near as France and as far as Cyprus sent young activists to the event, which I went into with an open mind since I’d never done anything similar before.

I attended as an observer for the English Secondary Students’ Association (ESSA), with the basic mission to find out what OBESSU was all about. ESSA is a very new organisation and is considering applying for membership of the umbrella body, but of course it’s best to see how everything works before doing so. Originally I was supposed to be joined by another Executive Council member, but unfortunately she was unwell so it was only me representing English students.

Although I arrived in Rome from Basel on the night train, the conference venue was actually Campobasso, a bit further south, not far away from Castropignano, where our hotel was situated. While Campobasso was a fairly large city, Castropignano was a little village on a hillside surrounded by green, which gave me a real taste of rural Italy. There were some great views of the area from our hotel, which seemed to be one of those old-fashioned family businesses and not very busy this time of year (a swimming pool with green water, which looked like it was carrying several diseases, was a good indicator of this).

One thing I learnt about Italian culture in general from this experience is that they are incredibly relaxed about everything time-wise. When sitting down for lunch at the hotel, we would often wait longer than half an hour before any food actually arrived. Unfortunately this seemed to become contagious onto all at our conference, as buses meant to leave at 8.30 in the morning often were delayed as well.

The first day was always going to be a long one, especially since the hired bus from Roma Termini station I was on arrived at the hotel around 2.30am the night before. Our main morning agenda item was a panel discussion featuring student representatives from some of the participating countries, who discussed differences between their school systems. It was quite interesting and I realised how much variation there is between them all.

Quite a few camera crews showed up for this opening session and I was very surprised when one reporter wanted to interview me. He asked questions largely off the topic of the convention, about the EU and if I favoured integration, and was clearly trying to catch me out so I said something controversial. Luckily I didn’t, choosing instead to talk about our event, but I hope nothing was lost in translation. It was quite funny to see myself on local news a bit later but the whole thing was good publicity for OBESSU and UDS.

In the afternoon we split into separate groups tackling prominent educational issues, for example ‘democracy and school student rights,’ ‘lifelong learning,’ ‘the Lisbon Strategy’ and my one, ‘privatisation and globalisation of education’. It was a fascinating topic and I didn’t really know that much to begin with, but one fault of the workshop was that for most of the first day, and much of the second, we worked on largely irrelevant tasks which didn’t really add anything to my knowledge of the main subject. Next time I would definitely recommend there to be more relevance to the overall theme of the group.

We worked in groups for the best part of three days, with the eventual result a declaration document. It’s a fine idea, but there was one major sticking point for me: no real system of procedure was in place for a lot of the negotiations and meetings we had as a whole group to thrash out the declaration’s content. The main one was incredibly messy, with around three hours of debate on the privatisation issue with endless proposals and an eventual end time of something like three in the morning.

It is things like this which need to be worked on for future events. There should have been a set of defined protocols in place for the meeting, which would clearly set out the role of chairperson, how OBESSU board members should participate and a deadline system for making proposals on the text. Everything would run a lot smoother and more democratically this way.

So do these points make the event an unconventional convention? In my view they do, because I strongly believe things should be better organised and managed, especially from a body as experienced as OBESSU. This may have been the first conference of the type, but it’s not the first event it has ever organised.

I don’t mean to be overly critical, but to provide points for future improvement and evaluation of what happened in Campobasso. Feedback is often the most important part of any event like this, which are of course very hard to organise, so I hope ours will be constructive. Actually many of the organisational difficulties were caused by massive snowfall in the area, thicker than anything I’ve ever seen, which meant buses had to drive a lot slower on the narrow, winding country roads in Castropignano.

My next destination is Rome, where I actually spent a day before arriving at the conference. In total I will have only one night there, although nearly three days and I’m really looking forward to it. Ever since learning about the Romans when I was much younger I’ve always wanted to see the city and all its history, so I couldn’t wait to get there.